Motion Capture (Mocap) technology involves dimension measurement, position and azimuth measurement of an object in a physical space, etc. By placing trackers at key points of the moving object, the positions of the trackers can be captured by the motion capture system, and the motion capture technology can be used in various fields, such as animation, gait analysis, biomechanics, and ergonomics. In principle, conventional motion capture technologies can be divided into the mechanical type, acoustic type, electromagnetic type, optical type, and so on.
The optical motion capture technology accomplishes the motion capture task by monitoring and tracking a specific optical spot on the target. Conventional optical motion capture technologies are mostly based on computer vision. In theory, for a point in space, as long as it can be seen from two cameras at the same time, the position of the point in space is determined by the images taken by the two cameras at the same time and camera parameters. When the cameras are shooting at a sufficiently high rate, the trajectory of the point can be obtained from the image sequences.
Because the range of activities of the target object being captured is large and there is no restriction from cables and mechanical devices, the optical motion capture system is widely used in various fields including film animation production, large-scale game production, and life science research field, etc. However, the drawback is that the system is expensive, especially the core device of the optical motion capture system, the motion capture camera, is very expensive. Therefore, it is important to reasonably configure an appropriate number of motion capture cameras while ensuring the effect of the motion capture in order to save the cost.
Currently, there seems no effective way to properly configure an appropriate number of motion capture cameras.